When we lock onto a goal then that goal becomes the whole world. That might sound ridiculous to us, but that’s what happens – the goal becomes our whole world and – furthermore – that world is split into two halves (one half being made up of stuff that is advantageous to us, and the other half being stuff that isn’t. The world is divided into ‘friends versus foes’, we might say, and so ‘if you’re not my friend then you must be my foe’. Optimization shrinks what we are able to be aware down to those elements which are relevant (either in the one way or the other) to the fulfilment of our agenda. Having a goal in mind causes us to see the world in a black-and-white way – ‘white’ meaning stuff that can help us, and ‘black’ being made up of what stands in our way. Everything is related to us, therefore, and if it isn’t related to us then we just don’t care.

What’s happening here is that we have closed down space – there is no more space, no more ‘open-ended field of radically different possibilities’. We are ‘closing down space’ because the goal we have locked so determinedly onto is – by necessity – a final state of affairs. We’re not looking for anything further; we’re not interested in going anywhere beyond this. We’re not interested in acknowledging that there could be anything beyond the goal (which is to say, that there is anything anywhere that could potentially relativize our goal, which is to say, make it less important). This is implicit in the nature of goals – the goal has to be the most important thing, the goal is what everything else in our subjective world is all about (in either a helping or hindering way, as we’ve just said). There’s no way around this – there can’t be anything beyond the goal or else the goal wouldn’t be final, wouldn’t be ‘an end point’, and a goal that isn’t final (that isn’t an end point) isn’t a goal. Or as we could also say, there can’t be anything that is not organised around the centre or else the centre would no longer be ‘a centre’.

Having a centre ‘closes down everything’, therefore – when there is a centre then everything is seen in terms of that centre and this means everything is the centre. The centre dominates – the centre is the lens through which we look at the world in order to make it make sense. There is – by the same token – no centre to be found anywhere in an open-ended universe. ‘The centre’ is a meaningless concept. Thus, we read in Liber XXIV Philosophorum [in a quote that is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus] – “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. ‘No boundaries’ means ‘no centre’ and what this indicates is quite simply that there can be no things (no objects) in the unbounded or open situation. An ‘all-enclosing circumference’ is needed for that. Another thing we could say here (recapitulating an earlier point that we made) is that the circle equals the circumference (and vice versa) since the latter is a tautological development of the former, the unlimited expansion of the former.

This turns out to be a very curious business indeed when we start to look into it – there’s nothing beyond the goal, nothing that ‘supersedes’ the goal (or else the goal wouldn’t be special, or else the goal wouldn’t be a goal) and so we can say that the attainment of the goal is where our subjective projected world ‘ends’. That’s where our interest ends. How can a world end though, how can there be a limit to space? What’s on the other side of the boundary?’ we might ask (in our innocent curiosity) – ‘what lies on the other side of the circumference that encloses our world?’ We’re not actually able to ask this question, however – we don’t have the capacity to think outside the box in this regard. If we could ‘think outside the box’ then we wouldn’t be in the box. The box wouldn’t exist in this case.

The box is made up of a bunch of limitations which we are incapable of seeing as such. It is in other words made up of lines drawn in the sand that we can neither cross nor acknowledge to be there. We are therefore unable to know that we are bounded, that we are enclosed on all sides, and because we’re unable to see that there is anything beyond the artificial boundary that ‘hems us in on all sides’ we’re not able to see that thereis one. Our black-and-white subjective world has thus – in an entirely illegitimate way – become the whole of everything. We’ve been enveloped – as if by a predatory amoeba – by a private reality bubble (or capsule) that doesn’t really exist which nevertheless seems to because of the way in which we act as if it does. We consistently act as if the limitations in question exist and this ‘conformist behaviour’ of ours is what creates the illusion.

We’re not talking about a real ‘end to the world’ therefore, but rather the limits of our vision, There is a cut-off point to our attention and as a result we live within this imaginary world (this imaginary world that has been brought about by our unreflective conformity to a bunch of rules that aren’t real). We’re inhabiting a virtual reality that has been brought into (virtual) existence as a result of the blind spot that we have cultivated via the mechanism of ‘fixating on a goal’ (and – as we’ve said – goals only get to be goals because of the way in which we compulsively or unfreely fixate on them). For goal to be a goal there has to be a cut-off point to our attention, and so the mechanism that we’re talking about here is the mechanism whereby we select a cut-off point (a point beyond which we have no interest) and then ‘lose interest’ in the fact that we have done so.  We thus ‘lose interest in the fact that we have lost interest’, and this is the ubiquitous state of ‘unconsciousness’ or ‘passive identification’. In this mode we ‘automatically accept the reality that we have been given’ (which of course means that we are infinitely manipulable).

What’s going on here is that there is an inversion taking place whereby ‘what is real becomes unreal and what is unreal becomes real’. This is the classic ‘reversal’ spoken of by the mystics, the reversal of the natural state of affairs in which we are ‘interested in the world as it is in itself’ and instead become ‘interested’ only in the world that we ourselves have made up, which we might call the ‘Designed World’. On the outside of our personal Virtual Reality Bubble there is nothing of interest; as far as we’re concerned there isn’t an outside (it doesn’t exist for us )but aside from our subjective view of things it nevertheless true that there is indeed ‘an outside’ (it just happens to be an outside that we are steadfastly ignoring, an ‘outside’ that we are stubbornly refusing to admit to exist). It’s an ‘outside’ (or a ‘beyond’) that we are in full-blown denial of.

Everything apart from my personal, subjectively biased ‘reality bubble’ is my blind spot, in other words. This blind spot isn’t some minor affair therefore – it’s as big as the world itself, it’s a Giant blind spot, an All-Encompassing blind spot. It’s a lack of vision on a global scale. And just to put this into proportion, we ought to point out that our subjective reality bubble isn’t just very small in scale, but that it is entirely hollow; our personal subjective reality bubble is hollow because the view and the viewpoint, the content and the description of the content, the circumference and the centre are one in the same thing. What we’re looking at here is tautological expansion, therefore; what we have here is ‘a geometrical point that is extended itself out onto a flat plane to produce a circle’ (and the circle is the same thing as the geometrical point which maps onto it) – the circle is the ‘tautological expansion’ of the point at the centre of the circle…

Geometrical points – as we all know – don’t take up any space, and the other way of putting this is to say that they are abstractions – they do not partake (in any way) in actual reality! we live ‘purely in terms of abstractions’ therefore and anything that isn’t ‘abstract’ (i.e., anything that is actually real) gets ignored by us – we ignore it as thoroughly as anyone could ever ignore anything. We put in a sterling performance as far as denial goes. We ignore what’s actually IS interesting (interesting because we ourselves didn’t create it) and focus fixatedly on what is fundamentally barren of interest, fundamentally barren of ‘nuance’, which is our ‘goal’ (and the world that is made up of our goal). All we are interested in is the Projected World in other words, and the Projected World is simply ‘ourselves written large’.







Image credit – gamerant.com